Typographic London
Some of the most popular posts on spatialanalysis are about typographic maps. I thought it would be cool to put together some of my favourite’s for London. Click on each…
Continue reading »Author: James Cheshire
Global Migration Maps
Migrations of people have existed for millennia and occur at a range of scales and time-periods (from small-scale journeys to work through to intercontinental resettlement). As a geographer I have long been interested in these and thought it was about time I mapped them! Using data from the Global Migrant Origin Database (thanks Adam for the tip) …
Continue reading »A City of Tweets
This is another great map animation from our friends in CASA. It is a year old now (almost to the day) but it remains one of the most engaging Twitter…
Continue reading »John Snow’s Cholera Map
Embedded below is a high resolution version of John Snow’s 1854 map of the Broad Street (now Broadwick Street) cholera outbreak. Widely cited as the one of the first (and…
Continue reading »Flattening the Earth
Flattening the Earth so that it can be easily drawn on a 2-dimensional surface is complicated. Over many years map projections have been developed to aid in this process, but they can only really estimate (albeit very accurately) the shape and dimensions of things on the Earth’s round surface. Whilst it is important to understand …
Continue reading »Visualising London Transport
Another brilliant visualisation from UCL’s CASA, this time from Anil Bawa-Cavia. It visualises trips made on the London Underground using data gathered from Oyster Cards. Each trail is a single trip between a…
Continue reading »World Transport Links and US Climate from The National Geographic over a Century ago
Following my previous post I have been digging around archive.org for interesting spatial/ geographical related resources. A search for “geographic” yielded a number of back issues of the National Geographic Magazine. They date back as far as 1888 and contain some great images and maps. There are some real gems to be had, such as …
Continue reading »Hyde Park Glove Map
If you lack a sense of direction and resort to writing directions on scraps of paper or the palm of your hand, this glove is for you. It was designed…
Continue reading »Automated Cartography: The urban expansion of Lansing
I hadn’t seen this video before. It demonstrates one of the earliest attempts at automated cartography for the display of time with spatial data. Truly ground breaking, the video shows the urban growth of Lansing at 5 yearly intervals from between 1850 and 1965 and was produced by Allan Schmidt at the Michigan State University Urban …
Continue reading »mappinglondon.co.uk: Another Blog about Maps!
Followers of spatialanalysis.co.uk will know that a lot of maps I feature are about London. Many of these maps have caught the eye of those outside of the geography, GIS/ spatial analysis community who don’t really have an interest in the technicalities of making the maps etc. Oliver O’Brien and I have decided to team …
Continue reading »ESRI (UK) Case Study
Buried deep in the ESRI (UK) website is a case study I helped put together showcasing some of the ways we use GIS (specifically ESRI products) within UCL Department of Geography and Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. ESRI (UK) co-sponsor my PhD research and I have had a very positive and productive relationship with the company. I …
Continue reading »Mapping London’s Population Change 1801-2030
Buried in the London Datastore are the population estimates for each of the London Boroughs between 2001 – 2030. They predict a declining population for most boroughs with the exception of a few to the east. I was surprised by this general decline and also the numbers involved- I expected larger changes from one year to …
Continue reading »Using R to Map with Google Chart Tools
The release of the R package “googleVis” has made the production of interactive maps through Google’s Chart Tools a simple task. Ignoring the some basic data manipulation the below map was produced with these two lines of code: library(googleVis) Geo=gvisGeoMap(Map, locationvar=”Country”, numvar=”Percentage”, options=list(height=350, dataMode=’regions’)) plot(Geo) This map, although simple to produce, is nontrivial as it …
Continue reading »Brilliant Boris Bikes Animation
Some of us at CASA can’t get enough of the Barclay’s Cycle Hire data. We have had Ollie‘s hugely successful flow maps, journey time heat maps, and now the the Sociable Physicist himself, Martin Austwick has created this stunning animation of the bikes. The TFL data release contained the start point, end point, and duration for around …
Continue reading »Carto-Junk?
The National Geographic Surname Map has generated a lot of discussion both online and via email. The response has been overwhelmingly positive but some people, unsurprisingly, have suggested improvements. A recent post on the great Junk Charts blog acts as a good summary of the comments I have received. For the purpose of this post I have …
Continue reading »R Maps
This is an updated version of my Making Maps with R tutorial. I think the code is lot simpler and it also includes some data for you to play around with. Background: Spatial data are becoming increasingly common, as are the tools available in R to process it. Of course one of the best ways […]
Continue reading »Handling Spatial Data with R
Spatial data are becoming increasingly common, as are the tools available in R to process it. It takes a little time to understand how R handles spatial data; this tutorial is designed to help get people started. It outlines how to create a simple spatial points object from as csv file, load and export a […]
Continue reading »Exporting KML from R
Google Earth has become a popular way of disseminating spatial data. KML is the data format required to do this. It is possible to load almost any type of spatial data format into R and export it as a KML file. In my experience R seems much quicker at doing this than many well-known GIS […]
Continue reading »Opendata+R+Google = Easy Maps
The release of the R package “googleVis” has made the production of interactive maps through Google’s Chart Tools a simple task. Ignoring the some basic data manipulation the below map was produced with these two lines of code: library(googleVis) Geo=gvisGeoMap(Map, locationvar=”Country”, numvar=”Percentage”, options=list(height=350, dataMode=’regions’)) plot(Geo) This map, although simple to produce, is nontrivial as it […]
Continue reading »GIS History from a UK/ European Perspective
Jack Dangermond and ESRI are sponsoring a survey of some early GIS pioneers, hoping to discover how much material they still hold on the early history of GIS and with a view to establish an archive that will capture this important legacy. Somewhat indirectly, I have been asked if I know of anything of this […]
Continue reading »FREE Open Data Master Classes
The past few months have seen a number of high profile announcements on the release of central and local government data for free. The Prime Minister launched the data.gov.uk portal to ‘open up data and promote transparency’ and the London Mayor announced the London Data Store to ‘give Londoners the change to find out more […]
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